The current method of gathering and obtaining device information required for diagnostics is manual and therefore complex, time-consuming and prone to human errors. In the course of a customer care session for a device, a CSR (Customer Service Representative) must undertake the extensive and time-consuming task of asking the user complex questions pertaining to their wireless devices for problem diagnosis. This situation is only getting worse with the passage of time as devices become more powerful and capable of handling more sophisticated tasks. This requires CSRs to be experts on many types of devices and their applications, and also requires users to spend increased time on the telephone to receive support for their applications. The result is increased support costs, increased call handling times, complex diagnostic processes and overall frustration. Therefore customers no longer want to call service providers to make changes to their services or to get some basic problem resolved.
One existing method to overcome the above issues is self-care including customer care apps and web based self-care systems, whereby information is provided to the users and they can use the information to resolve some of the basic issues themselves, thus helping reduce some of the costs.
Although such systems deliver a more convenient, always-on communication channel, that helps lower cost of customer service and reducing staff workload, by eliminating the number of customer service calls, there are still serious shortcomings.
One common issue with such systems is that each customer has to solve their own problem from the beginning. As such methods lack automation, the user is required to sift through massive amounts of data manually to get to the relevant information. Thus what one customer has learned cannot be passed onto another customer in a codified or systematic method.
Another drawback is that the devices are complicated with hundreds of user changeable parameters. If a customer makes too many changes or installs too many apps that may conflict with each other, or in wanting to fine tune their device by changing the parameters, they may actually make its performance worse than before.
One typical way to get out of this situation is to revert the device to factory settings; typically devices have two options “Factory Data Reset” which erases all data on the device, or a “Settings Reset” which resets the device settings to its factory settings without erasing the data. In either case all personalization of the device is lost. Further, the factory reset or settings reset state may not take advantage of all available updates or currently available improvements for that device type.
Therefore we note that prior art methods have inherent limitations and are in need of improvement.